Written by: Siva S.
Behind every brilliant invention, is a brilliant mind, a mind that has thought outside the box of normalcy, and has been brave to venture off to what others would say was ridiculous.
Look at the developers Google, two Computer Science Stanford University Grad Students, who dropped out of school to start up Google in 1998. Beginning with only four employees, they’ve grown to own 65.5% of the US Web-Search Market. (I’m not advocating for anyone to dropout of school). I think education can be very valuable, and integral in skill building and knowledge building. But, what I am trying to say is that sometimes, thinking outside the box, is what wins, and sometimes, that means it is okay to break conventions and norms and do what everyone thinks is crazy.
Creativity is what sells. So what can we do to develop this creativity? Play.
Yup, that’s right, play. Rewind back 10 to 15 years, and I can assure you, that someone you played with LEGO, or Play-Doh. These, are the best kinds of toys to help empower children to think creatively, imaginatively, and originally. Creative play can open up the minds of children to constantly develop their own ideas, and think outside the box. It exposes children to various play-patterns, where they are the writers and creators of their stories and inventions. It provides them materials that they can mould, build, and break to align with their visions. It should come to surprise than that LEGO, is the host of the famous International Robotics Competition (http://www.firstlegoleague.org/). LEGO helps build children’s minds by exposing them to the idea that they can build whatever they want, using simple materials using science and technology. It provides students the ability to develop technical skills. But most importantly, it provokes students to want to learn, to want to build, to want to imagine beyond the known. LEGO isn’t just building blocks, it’s the gateway to a whole realm of possibilities, and we as older siblings, educators, parents, and as mentors need to realize how valuable play can be in developing the minds of youngsters.
Play has always served some kind of use, in the Victorian Times, ragdolls were used not only as a form of play for young girls, but as a socialization mechanism to held accustom girls to the norms, cultures and values of Victorian society. Through role-play, story telling and play, girls would learn how to be good Victorian women, and would be bred with values that would serve useful in the marriages. Today, the whole Disney Princess Empire is built upon this idea, of narrative-storytelling and identification.
Games teach us a lot, today more and more, research is showing that video games help youngsters build cognitive, hand-coordination (that’s useful to many professional in engineering and medicine) and spatial skills.
But, let’s start with the basic building blocks, LEGO. The possibilities of our imaginations are endless; we can build whatever we want, as long as we think outside the box. It’s basic, but it brilliant. Creative play.
I’ll leave you with this quote by legendary, and visionary Steve Jobs.
“Here’s to the crazy ones, the misfits, the rebels, the troublemakers, the round pegs in the square holes… the ones who see things differently — they’re not fond of rules… You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them, but the only thing you can’t do is ignore them because they change things… they push the human race forward, and while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius, because the ones who are crazy enough to think that they can change the world, are the ones who do.”
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Bibliography:
Formanek-Brunell, M. (1998). The politics of dollhood in nineteenth-century America. In Jenkins (pp. 363-381).
Narine, N., & Grimes, S. M. (2009). The turbulent rise of the child gamer. Communication, Culture & Critique, 2(3), 319 – 338.
Wohlwend, K.E. (2009) Damsels in discourse: Girls consuming and producing identity texts through Disney Princess play. Reading Research Quarterly, 44(1), 57–83.
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